Why It’s So Hard to Cut Back on Water Use

JEFFREY BALL: Short-term or long-term, the most effective solution to the drought in California and other parts of the U.S. West would be the most difficult: Get people—from farmers to industrialists to consumers—to use less water.

The task is herculean: to transform a system built on decades of policies that have kept water cheap, and to do it in an arid region that’s key to the nation’s food supply. Doing it would offend almost every political constituency, throughout the West and beyond it. It would be harder than curbing Americans’ energy use, because Americans have come to expect cheap water arguably even more than they have cheap electricity or oil.

Today, in crisis mode, California is responding to the drought by wielding emergency fiat. It’s slashing the amount of water that farmers get from the state’s massive distribution system, and state and local governments are imposing tight water-use restrictions on consumers. In the state that essentially invented car culture, many cities are telling their residents to wash their cars only with buckets of water—not with hoses. They’re also telling consumers to use, in landscaping, only drought-tolerant plants.

Such mandates aren’t likely to work forever. Scientists disagree about how long California’s drought will last. If the dry spell proves long-standing, the state is likely to have to raise the price of water if it wants to change the way people consume it. The experience of other states—notably Arizona—shows that, when people are hit with policies that raise the price of water, they use less of it.

Jeffrey Ball (@jeff_ball), formerly The Wall Street Journal’s environment editor and a longtime energy reporter at the paper, is scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, a joint initiative of Stanford’s law and business schools. He writes about energy and heads a project exploring the relationships among countries in the globalizing clean-energy industry.